Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (31 page)

The old woman with the tortoise appeared. She sat down opposite Lillian, with an angry face. Between stakes, she whispered with the turtle. On her yellow hand a diamond of great beauty rotated loosely. Her neck was as wrinkled as that of the tortoise, and Lillian saw the resemblance between the two. They also had the same kind of almost lidless eyes which showed no whites.

Lillian was now playing alternately black and thirteen. When she looked up after a while, she saw that Clerfayt was standing
across the table, watching her play. Without thinking of it, she had followed the same betting pattern as Boris Volkov, and she saw that Clerfayt had noticed it. Rebelliously, she continued to bet on thirteen. After six coups it came. “Enough,” she said, and raked her jettons into her bag. She had won, but did not know how much.

“Do you want to go on soon?” Fiola asked. “This is your night—that’s plain. It will never come again!”

“The night is over. If we were to draw the curtains at the windows, the pale morning would turn us all into ghosts. Good night, Fiola. Go on playing.”

When she stepped out with Clerfayt, she saw the Riviera as it must have been before the tourists had discovered it. The sky gleamed a brassy yellow and blue while it waited for the sun; the sea was white on the horizon, and translucent as aquamarine. A few fishing boats stood out at sea with yellow and red sails. The beach was quiet; no cars were moving on any of the streets. The wind smelled of lobster and of sea.

Lillian did not understand where the quarrel had blown up from. She heard Clerfayt, but it was some time before she understood what he was so worked up about. “What can I do?” she heard him saying. “I have to fight against a shadow, against someone I can’t grasp, someone who isn’t here and is therefore all the more here, who is transfigured because he isn’t here, who has the great advantage of being absent, which gives him a thousand points to his credit, while I’m here and you see me as I am, as I am now, beside myself, unjust if you will, petty, silly, and against all that, stands the glorious ideal image which can’t do anything wrong because it does nothing, and I can’t do anything against it, any more than I could do anything against the memory of someone dead!”

Exhausted, Lillian leaned her head back.

“Isn’t it so?” Clerfayt demanded, pounding his fist on the steering wheel. “Tell me whether it isn’t so! I’ve sensed it all along. That’s why you’ve been evading me. That’s the reason you won’t marry me. You want to go back. That’s it! You want to go back!”

Lillian raised her head. What was this? She looked at Clerfayt. “What’s that you’re saying?”

“Isn’t it true? Haven’t you been thinking that, even now?”

“I was only thinking how awfully stupid the cleverest people can be. Don’t drive me away by force.”

“
I
drive you away? I’m doing everything I can to hold you.”

“Do you think this is the way to hold me? Good Lord!”

Lillian let her head sink back again. “You don’t have to be jealous. Boris would not even want me if I went back.”

“That hasn’t anything to do with it. You’d like to go back.”

“Don’t drive me back. Oh God, have you been struck blind?”

“Yes,” Clerfayt said, “probably. Probably,” he repeated. “But I can’t do anything about it, now. That’s how it is.”

They drove in silence along the Corniche toward Antibes. A donkey cart was coming toward them. On its seat sat a teenage girl, singing. Lillian looked at the girl with searing envy. She thought of the old tortoise-woman at the casino who had years of life ahead of her, and she saw the laughing girl, and then she thought of herself, and suddenly there came again one of those moments in which everything became incomprehensible and no tricks helped at all; the misery overwhelmed her and everything within her cried out in impotent rebellion: Why? Why me? What have I done that I am the one to be struck down?

With blinded eyes, she looked out into the magical landscape. The strong fragrance of flowers wafted across the road. “Why are
you crying?” Clerfayt demanded irritably. “You don’t have any reason to cry.”

“I suppose I don’t.”

“You’re unfaithful to me with a shadow,” he said bitterly. “And you cry.”

Yes, she thought, but the shadow’s name is not Boris. Shall I let him know what its name is? But then he will lock me up in a hospital and put guards in front of the door, so that I am tended to death behind frosted-glass windows, surrounded by the smell of disinfectants, good will, and the insipid stench of human refuse.

She looked at Clerfayt’s face. No, she thought, not the prison of this love. Protest against it is useless. There’s only flight. The fireworks are over; there is no sense poking around in the ashes.

The car drove into the hotel yard. An Englishman in a terry robe was already going down to the beach to swim. Clerfayt helped Lillian out of the car without looking at her. “You won’t be seeing much more of me,” he said. “Tomorrow, training starts.”

He was exaggerating. The race was through the city, and training for it was virtually impossible. The streets could only be blocked off for the race itself; otherwise the drivers had to limit themselves chiefly to driving the route and memorizing the way they planned to shift.

As if gazing down a long corridor, Lillian saw what remained, what could still possibly happen between them. It was a corridor that narrowed steadily, and did not have an exit. She could not walk along it. Others, who had more time, probably could do it. Not she. And in love, there was no turning back. You could never begin afresh; what had happened remained in your blood. Clerfayt could never again be as he had been with her. He could be that way with any other woman, but not with her. What they had had could no more be recalled than time, and no sacrifice, no readiness, no
amount of good will would suffice. That was the sad, the inexorable law. Lillian knew it, and for that reason she wanted to leave. The remnant of her life was her whole life—but in Clerfayt’s life it was only a small part. It therefore depended entirely on her, not on Clerfayt. The scales were too uneven; what would be only an episode in his life, although he did not believe it now, was the end for her. She could not throw it away; she knew that now. She felt no regret; she had too little time even for that. But she felt a clarity that resembled the morning’s clarity. And with this clarity the last mists of misunderstanding vanished. She felt the small, sharp joy of decision. And—strangely—with the decision her tenderness returned—for she was now out of danger.

“Nothing of what you’ve been saying is true, Clerfayt,” she said in a changed voice. “Nothing whatsoever! Forget it. It isn’t true. None of it.”

She saw his face brightening. “You’ll stay with me?” he asked quickly.

“Yes,” she said. She wanted no more quarrels in their last days.

“You finally see what I want.”

“Yes,” she replied, smiling.

“You’ll marry me?”

He did not sense her hesitation. “Yes,” she said. That, too, did not matter now.

He stared at her. “When?”

“Whenever you say. In autumn.”

He was silent for a moment. “At last!” he said then. “At last! You’ll never regret it, Lillian.”

“I know that.”

At one stroke he was transformed. “You’re tired! You must be dead tired. You have to get to bed. Come, I’ll take you up.”

“And what about you?”

“I’ll have myself a morning dip, like the Englishman, then drive
over the course until the traffic starts. It’s just a matter of routine; I know the route.” He stood at her door. “What an idiot I am! I lost more than half my winnings. Out of sheer temper.”

“I won.”

Lillian tossed her bag, filled with jettons, on the table. “I haven’t counted them.”

“We’ll win again tomorrow. Are you going to see a doctor?”

“Yes. Now I have to sleep.”

“Of course. Straight through till evening. Then we’ll have something to eat and go to sleep again. I love you beyond anything.”

“And I you, Clerfayt.”

He closed the door gently behind him. As if leaving a sick person, she thought. It was the first time he had done that. She sat down on the bed, without an ounce of strength left.

The window was open. She saw him going down to the beach. After the race, she thought. I must pack and leave after the race, when he has to go to Rome. Just these few days more, she thought. She did not know where she would go. Nor did it matter. But she had to leave.

THE COURSE WAS ONLY
about two miles long, but it led through the streets of Monte Carlo, right through the middle of the city, along the shore, over the mountain on which the casino stood, and back. In many places it was barely wide enough for passing, and consisted almost entirely of curves, double turns, hairpin turns, and sharply angled serpentines. A hundred rounds had to be driven, nearly two hundred miles; that meant shifting, braking, giving gas, shifting, and again braking and giving gas tens of thousands of times.

“A merry-go-round,” Clerfayt said laughingly to Lillian. “A sort of circus act. There isn’t any stretch where you can even half let the buggy out. Where are you sitting?”

“In the stand. Tenth row on the right.”

“It will be hot. Do you have a hat?”

“Yes.” Lillian showed him the small straw hat she held in her hand.

“Good. This evening, we’ll eat lobster and drink chilled wine in the Pavillion d’Or by the sea. And tomorrow we’ll drive over to see someone I know; he’s an architect, and we’ll ask him to make a plan
for redoing the house. So it will be bright, with big windows and lots of sunlight.”

The manager called out something to Clerfayt in Italian. “It’s starting,” Clerfayt said, buttoning his white overalls at the neck. He took a piece of wood from his pocket, knocked it against the car and then against his hand.

“Ready?” the manager shouted.

“Ready.”

Lillian kissed Clerfayt and performed the necessary spells of racing superstition. She spat lightly at the car and Clerfayt’s racing outfit, and murmured the curse that was supposed to bring about the opposite; then she raised her hands with two fingers outspread toward the track and the other pits—it was the
jettatore
exorcism of the evil eye. The Italian mechanics looked at her in mute appreciation as she passed them. Behind her, she heard the manager praying: “Oh sweet blood of Jesus and you, Mother of Sorrows, help Clerfayt and Frigerio and—”

She turned around at the door of the pit. The wives of Marchetti and two other drivers had already taken up their stations with stop watches and notebooks. I ought not to leave him, she thought, raising her hand. Clerfayt laughed and saluted. He looked very young. “And all you saints, burn up the others’ tires twice as fast as ours!” the manager prayed, and then shouted: “Ready for the start! Everybody out who doesn’t belong here!”

Twenty cars started. In the first round, Clerfayt stayed in the eighth position; he had not had a favorable place and had been a moment too slow at the start. He hung on behind Micotti, who he knew would attack. Frigerio, Monti, and Sacchetti were ahead of them; Marchetti held the lead.

In the fourth round, Micotti, overrevving his motor, shot out on
the straight stretch that rose up to the casino and passed Sacchetti. Clerfayt clung to his rear wheels; he forced the motor likewise and passed Sacchetti barely before entering the tunnel. When he came out of it, he saw Micotti’s car, smoking and slowing down. He passed him and began chasing Monti. Three rounds later, on the hairpin turn by the gas tank he reached him and clung like a terrier to his rear wheels.

Ninety-two rounds and seventeen competitors to go, he thought, and he saw a second car stopping at the pit beside Micotti’s. The manager signaled to him not to attack for the time being. Probably Frigerio and Marchetti, who did not like each other, were battling between themselves at the firm’s expense, instead of keeping team discipline, and the manager wanted to keep Clerfayt and Meyer III in reserve, in case the lead drivers ruined their cars.

Lillian saw the pack racing past the stands at intervals of less than two minutes. You had just seen the cars, and looked aside for a moment, when they were back again, their order differing slightly, but almost as if they had never been away. It was like pushing the glass plate of a magic lantern back and forth, in and out. How can they possibly count the hundred rounds? she thought. Then she recalled the praying, sweating, cursing manager who held out signboards and flags for them to see, waving and changing his signals according to some secret code.

After forty rounds, she wanted to leave. Something told her that she ought to depart now, at once, take the train before the race was over. The prospect of watching the slight shifts in the field another sixty times seemed to her as barren a waste of time as the endless hours spent in the sanatorium, when one did nothing but watch the hands creep round the clock. She had a ticket to Zurich in her bag. She had bought it that morning, while Clerfayt was taking one last practice drive over the course. It was a ticket for the day after tomorrow. Clerfayt would then have to fly to Rome, but only
for two days. The plane was leaving in the morning, the train in the evening. Like a thief, she thought, like a traitor, I am sneaking away. Just as I wanted to sneak away from Boris at the sanatorium. Then she had had that last talk with Boris anyhow, but what good had it done? The wrong words were always said; you always lied because the truth was useless cruelty; and the end was always bitterness and despair that you could do nothing about and that always made the last memory one of dispute, misunderstanding and hatred.

She looked in her bag for the ticket. For a moment, she thought she had lost it. That moment sufficed to restore her determination. In spite of the warm sunlight, she shivered. I have fever again, she thought, and listened to the crowd shouting around her. Down below, at the blue toy harbor with its white yachts, on which people stood jammed, the cars raced by, and one of the little toy autos thrust to one side and outdistanced another. “Clerfayt!” a brawny woman beside her shouted jubilantly, pounding her program against plump thighs under a linen skirt. “The son of a gun made it!” she roared in English.